Christmas is one of my favorite holidays. Ok, probably my favorite, the next one is Easter. Both celebrate God’s unconditional love for us, in Christ’s birth and then His death and resurrection giving us hope for an eternal life. That’s powerful knowledge.
I’ll admit I go a bit overboard on the whole Christmas decorating thing. Over the years I have amassed an alarming amount of Christmas decorations, many of them handmade by myself or my four children, many given to me by friends or foreign exchange students we’ve had the privilege of having with us. Many were purchased at after Christmas sales, bargain stores or antique shops. The point is, I have a LOT of them.
I used to only have one large real Christmas tree each year that I would decorate with all the various decorations, the kids’ ornaments always having priority and they still do. Each year Jay, I and the kids would go to a Christmas tree lot and pick out a tree and watch Jay saw it down. Over the years that too dwindled as children left our home for theirs and now Jay just buys a local tree in town. He bases his decision on my size and shape, short and rounded.
A tradition I started with the birth of my first child was each year I would make or buy each child a new Christmas ornament and when they moved out of the house and started their own homes, each child got their box of Christmas ornaments to decorate their first Christmas tree. Once they were all out of the nest, it became a little more hit and miss each year as the family grew, and many of them started that same tradition for their children, one I have hoped they will carry on.
As years passed and my house grew in size and less in people living in it, I also began to collect a wide variety of artificial Christmas trees. Most were purchased at garage sales during the summers, and a few at after Christmas sales, until I finally had a Christmas tree for each room. I was in heaven!
Now the next task was organizing my ornaments so that I could make some type of a “themed” tree in each room. I don’t know why that seemed important, as my real tree is always my favorite and it is always a giant hodge podge of ornaments and lights. It started in my husband’s TV room, loosely called “the den” where I placed the first artificial tree with sports type ornaments on it, you know Santa fishing, a wooden fish, a hunting dog or two, various sports balls, etc. It was the fake Alpine style tree that is supposed to make your home look very woodsy I guess.
As I gathered in more artificial trees I started to collect more ornaments to go with the themes I had given to each room of the house. My bathroom has a nautical theme as I love ships and the oceans, so the tiny tree set in there also has that theme with shells for ornaments and Santa as a ship’s captain.
The kitchen of course has a tiny tree with little tea cups and coffee mugs, a tiny grater, and tiny cookie cutters on it. The dining room I went with a snowman tree as I had a lot of snowmen ornaments I’d collected over the years, and then I added small glass ball ornaments with each grandchild’s name on it so it is now called the grandchildren’s tree.
The laundry room was an unusual choice and I didn’t go for the obvious laundry day theme but went with penguins instead. It has a small white artificial tree with tiny Christmas balls with cute little penguins on it and I set my stuffed penguin in there beside it.
The main basement family room has a medium sized green artificial tree with a set of pool ball ornaments on it and little hearts I cut out from old music books. In the kids playroom aka guest bedroom, aka my bedroom is a tree made from felt with all felt ornaments on it that the grandkids can play with. This year I also added a “bird” themed tree to that room with beautiful bird ornaments I bought at a garage sale last summer. Some day that tree will go into my craft room if that ever becomes a reality.
The final tree I added this year was a medium sized green artificial tree I went and purchased after Thanksgiving when I discovered a sack of long forgotten ornaments in the living room closet where all of my seasonal decorations are stored (about 10 totes of just Christmas stuff, but who’s counting). The ornaments were from an antique store in Lake Mills, Wisconsin where I had lived with my daughter Torri while she was battling cancer. The ornaments were all a beautiful light peachy color or cream color and I set the tree on the small bookcase that sits in the living room entryway. It was a little tribute to Torri who also loved Christmas.
I started doing this decorating a couple of days after Christmas, hauling out tote after tote from the living room closet. As I did so the OCD or whatever it is in me, decided that it would also be a great time to go through all of the ornaments in each tote and all of the various decorations and get rid of the ones I no longer use or care for and organize the rest. This whole process literally took me weeks and by Christmas day I had just finished putting up the last decorations around the house.
All of the boxes and totes were still scattered across the front of the living room and I had family arriving in just a couple of days. I started to shove things into totes, and boxes, foregoing any organizing for the moment. One Christmas tote I emptied and put all of the normal living room decorations into with a note on top so after Christmas I could put them all back into their place. I shoved everything into the closet and shut the door.
Now the house cleaning ritual began, and I got my Christmas Holiday binder out and started checking off each task as I went. I was in full blown Christmas celebration mode now. Soon the house glistened, the gifts were all wrapped, the menu’s all planned, gifts were all mailed out to those who could not be with us. I had the agenda all figured out, what could possibly go wrong?
Until next time – Toni